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CREATING A PAN MODEL INTERFACE DRIVER ON SOLARIS

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Abstract

GrayMatter Software's ScriptServer® PAN Printing System is a distributed printing system which is supported on various architectures including Linux, Sun Microsystems' Solaris, HP's HP-UX and Tru64.

While not recommended by GrayMatter as best practices, it is possible under Solaris to create a printing subsystem model interface driver (MID) which makes the PAN appear as any other printer to the lp command.

Job Submission with panpr and lp

Typically, a PAN will accept jobs in a number of ways:

• the web interface;
• LPD;
• a Windows print driver;
• on the Linux/Unix/Solaris/HP-UX command line with panpr.

panpr provides a more feature-rich interface than the traditional lp/lpr.

When legacy applications already use lp and modifying them to use panpr is impractical, then there is no alternative to lp and a MID must be created to invoke panpr.

The Model Interface Driver (MID) Explained

Under the Solaris 8 printing model, the spooler communicates with the printer device via a model interface driver (MID). Solaris ships with two, standard and netstandard, which will be found in /var/spool/lp/model. These are ordinary shell scripts which can be edited with the text editor of your choice.

The MID is responsible for:

• configuring the device;
• applying filters to the job;
• generating a banner page; and, finally
• sending the job to the device.

The GUI-based Printer Administrator has two different modes which correspond to the two supplied MIDs:

• serial/parallel (standard); and
• networked (netstandard).

Creating And Using the MID

GrayMatter will provide assistance to customers who are under support.

Basically the steps involved are:

1. Copy the Sun - supplied netstandard MID. (call it panstandard):
   • Replace the call to netpr with a call to panpr, with appropriate changes to the command line parameters and switches.
   • Since PAN generates its own banner pages and generally does its own equivalent of filtering, remove those sections of the code. You may want to retain the function of the switch, mapping it to the panpr -flag parameter.
   • Define additional PAN - specific print options (-o switches) if desired.
2. Create a network printer with the GUI-based Printer Administrator:
   • The Solaris (lp) queue name should be the same as the PAN queue.
   • (the printer server will be the host)
   • Printer type will typically be PostScript and the file contents will typically be "both PostScript and ASCII". Even if your printer is a PCL-only printer, the printer type can be PostScript because the PAN will perform the appropriate conversion; contact GrayMatter if you have questions or if you need to submit jobs of some other data type to the queue .
   • Destination should be set to "PAN" but it is ignored.
   • Protocol is ignored.
3. Replace the netstandard MID with the panstandard MID using the lpadmin command:

   cd /var/spool/lp/model
lpadmin -p printername -i panstandard

That's it!

If you had a working netstandard queue which you converted as above, you can generally revert by simply reissuing the lpadmin command specifying netstandard instead of panstandard. (If you've specified custom -o options, this may not work, or may result in errors being logged when printing on the queue.)

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